Health News - Why ‘disabled’ and ‘disability’ are more different than you’d think

Published: 8 April, 2010
by JOSH LOEB

Disabled is a “nonsense word”. So says Danny Simani, a tireless campaigner for the rights of – to use his terminology – “differently-abled” people.
Despite contracting poliomyelitis, commonly known as polio, aged four, he has led an extremely active life.
And faced with the crippling side-effects of the large amounts of penicillin he was given to combat the deadly virus (“I was given so much,” he says “that my entire body dried up”), he has proved physical disabilities do not necessarily disable a person.
He has worked in numerous jobs including as a freelance IT consultant and a car mechanic, and in his spare time he helps blue badge residents of Camden and other London boroughs fight parking fines as well as teaching a film course at the Hilldrop Community Centre, near to his home off Camden Road.
If polio enters the bloodstream it can destroy motor neurones and degrade muscles.
A vaccine was created in America in the late 1940s and the disease has since been largely eradicated. However, it was unavailable in provincial Iran, the country of Mr Simani’s birth, at the time he contracted the virus.
“Polio was a major epidemic in the 1940s and 1950s, partly because of the war,” he says. “When I was 10 I came to the UK for treatment with help of charity.
“I was given physiotherapy and crutches, which enabled me to walk. It was the best time in my life. Before that I hadn’t been able to walk; I had just sat on the floor all the time.”
After finishing boarding school, Mr Simani studied physics at university, subsequently working in the field of computing.
At the same time, he campaigned for the rights of people with physical disabilities, writing to local authorities to highlight cases in which wheelchair-bound residents were not provided with suitable ground floor accommodation and fighting for people’s “different abilities” to be recognised and catered for.
He says: “At present, legal systems are not well enough established to cater for various categories of physical disability. People who are disabled might have to do something that in the eyes of the law is illegal. It’s not that they want to break the law, but sometimes they have no choice – for example, parking in area where parking is not permitted, in order
to access a shop.”
He says the notion of disability is all too often “based on ignorance”, arguing that the word is commonly used
inaccurately.
“People have this notion that anyone with a physical disability is disabled,” he says. “In fact we are differently abled.
“Being disabled means being able to do nothing – like a cabbage. In fact, anyone who has a physical or genetic disability somehow finds a way through different means.
“Granted, a person with good legs can run and I cannot, but that is like saying an athlete can run faster than someone who is not an athlete and so the athlete is normal.”
Mr Simani says that when people meet him for the first time, they often assume he leads a constrained life. However, many of them quickly realise that he is “more able than they are”.
At its peak in the 1940s and 1950s, polio would paralyse or kill over half a million people worldwide each year.
Survivors of the virus are thought to number 10 to 20 million worldwide today.